The Obama administration, after the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, is now pushing for internet privacy laws. They want to enforce "do not track" requests by law.
That's not what we consumers need. We need browsers that defeat trackers. A good browser, backed up by a secure operating system (anything other than Windows), would deny trackers any information, starting by refusing to accept cookies. The WSJ recently reported that both Internet Exploder and Firefox, would accept cookies, and even worse, give websites access to cookies, AFTER the users had told the browser[s] to refuse all cookies.
There ought to be a market here. I would pay reasonable money for a less treacherous browser. Say $50, for a browser that would never accept a cookie. Right now browsers are free, so the browser programmers write browsers to make money by selling you out to marketers. The programmers get paid to do that. Surely there are enough customers to pay for a secure browser?
At any rate, I feel more secure WITHOUT Obama writing internet privacy laws.
What's a cookie you ask? Why should you care?
Cookies are data files ON YOUR HARD DRIVE, that are written by a website. They can be read back later by that same website, and probably every over website on the net. Once a website decides that you are interested in X, or Y, or Z, it writes that into the cookie file. Next time you visit that site, it shows you ads for X or Y or Z. The cookie is memory for the website, This is how the website remembers what kind of ads to plague you with. Get rid of the cookies, and the website has no way of knowing what you did last time you surfed their site.
In the mean time, you can remove all the cookies from your hard drive. Firefox at least will delete all the cookies on your hard drive. Click on tools->options. Select the Privacy tab. Select "remove individual cookies". Once into the cookie buster, you will find as selection to crush ALL cookies. In Firefox, this really works, the cookies do go away.
They come back of course, but the new cookies can be zapped again.
2 comments:
There's an fix to tell browsers to not store cookies unless they're from a specific site. Most websites that you want to use requires cookies to function (Banks, Netflix, Amazon, aka people you want to do business with).
In Firefox 10
Click on Tools in the menu bar and click on Options.
Go to the Privacy tab
Uncheck Accept Cookies from Sites
Click Exceptions then add in www.example.com or www.netflix.com
Just sites that you want to have cookies so you can use them.
Unfortunately it doesn't block other sites from reading your cookies from Amazon/Netflix/etc., but it is better than nothing.
Paid browsers died with Netscape. Unfortunately cookies are integrated into the basic functioning of the internet, so without a massive agreement to shift things to a better system they'll be around to stay.
I'm running Firefox 10.02 and the "Accept Cookies from Sites" option no longer appears in the Options->Privacy tab.
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